Plenty of Firing but Not Among My Neurons

After a long week, including an unplanned sleepover in Nowheresville last night, my addled brain couldn't cope with very much this evening. I was practically jogging back from the tube station this evening so keen was I to make it back chez moi in one piece. Obviously, this level of zombie-dom could only be treated with a dose of The Apprentice and some of my favourite fresh pasta--tomato and mozzarella girasoli from M&S (and not just because girasole means "sunflower").

I'm not sure whether I watch The Apprentice for its strangely addictive, train-wreck awfulness or because I enjoy reading the snarky liveblogging on the Grauniad's Organ Grinder blog, but watch it I usually do and it is entertaining to watch the cunning editing which manages each week to make me to hate another character candidate more than all the others.

This week, though, in the midst of attempting to find the value of and then flog ten random items, my favourite bookshop on the Charing Cross Road was invaded by a bluff of apprentices attempting to flog a James Bond first edition without wanting to be bovvered with the endless banter and deliberations of "the book people." I won't be able to look at that shop in the same light again now, even though it's a great bookshop with a great collection of cheap, second-hand fiction in its slightly damp basement and the friendly guys who run the place curating upstairs. I'll definitely have to avoid it on Saturday, anyway, as the publicity will probably mean it's even more rammed than usual.

As the episode was aired on Wednesday, I have been careful to avoid the entertainment page of the BBC News website for the past two days as they have a habit of revealing who got fired and therefore also which team loses. It's far more interesting to watch the show when you don't know which team loses because then you can play spot-the-oh-so-subtle-editing-hints yourself. Unfortunately, I forgot to open up the main iPlayer website (which doesn't reveal any information about the firee), instead going to the show website, which had a big banner announcing who had been fired, alongside the "rewatch on iPlayer" link. Slight error but in the circumstances, it wasn't too incompetent of me.